How to place IDE harddrives

[pico]

I am the happy owner of a RR card, a cd-rom, a cd writer and a fairly new IBM Harddisk. All IDE. I have just bought a new harddisk (also IBM) and I am wondering just how I should place these 4 drives in order to get the optimal performance for video editing. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Pico

[Dr Mordrid]

This is my own personal opinion, so take it FWIW;

IDE0/master: boot drive (natch)
IDE0/slave: empty
IDE1/master: Video drive (the biggest drive)
IDE1/slave: empty

Now, get a PCI ATA controller and install the CDROM and CD burner as masters on it. The Promise Ultra33, Ultra66 or the SIIG UltraIDE Pro all work well for this and cost $25-$30.

With this setup every drive is a master and won't conflict with the others.

Before I installed RAID arrays on everything here this is how I had most of my sytems set up and it worked great.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 21 September 2000).]

[dchip]

I have mine set up similarly except the HDD's are on a Promise Ultra 66 and the CD-ROM and CDR are on the IDE channels. Each drive is a master and it works quite well with video.

[This_Idiot]

We all love arguing about this question

I had a similar setup to that you describe in my original RR-S host. I messed about a bit, and ended up with the following setup :

IDE1 Master : Boot drive
IDE1 Slave : AVI drive
IDE2 Master : CD Burner
IDE2 Slave : CDRom

Both HDs were Fujitsu MPC's, the CDRom a Panasonic 32x slot drive, the burner a Mitsumi 4x/2x IDE unit. Processor Pentium 233MMX, 64Mb RAM.

I had no problems with MJPG capture at full frame, full rate PAL.

HW combinations are so variable that I couldn't guarantee this would work for everyone, but you could give it a try before investing in a separate controller.

[wkulecz]

I've had no problems with G200 Marvel Media Studio Pro 5.2, AMD K6-3 400, ASUS P5A using win98 DMA IDE drivers and

Primary Master: Boot drive
Primary Slave: CDROM or CD-RW

Secondary Master: AVI drive
Secondary Slave: CD-RW or CDROM

I've used both configs for the CDROM and CD-RW -- doesn't seem to matter in my system.

Replacing the CDROM with a DVD resulted in unsmooth DVD playback (PowerDVD software player) unless I used the ALI IDE drivers. Unfortunately, the ALI drivers broke smooth DMB1 (marvel MJPEG) output to tape despite a slight improvement in the drives data transfer rate as measured by Matrox Disk Benchmark. Go figure.

I put the DVD in a different system, and went back to the W98 DMA IDE drivers.

--wally.

[Michel Carleer]

Two drives on the same cable (same controller) will use the tranfer protocol of the slowest one. CD drives (readers and burners) still use the PIO4 protocol. Not even DMA33! So, better avoid putting CD drives on the same cable as your HD.
Michka

[wkulecz]

Michel,
That was true before the ATAPI standard, but its not true any more.

There are still lots of old systems out there with buggy non-ATAPI compliant IDE controllers but I doubt these will work well for video editing period.

Besides any decent ATAPI CDROM or CR-RW or DVD will run at least UDMA33 nowdays.

If you insist that UDMA66 is worth the hassles, then Doc's advice is best. (Assuming you don't run out of IRQs and experience sharing problems)

--wally.




[This message has been edited by wkulecz (edited 22 September 2000).]

[Michel Carleer]

Wally,
Go and check on the various sites for the specs of the CD-ROM and CD-R/RW drives. You will be surprised. Even the brand new Plextor 12x10x32 which manages to avoid buffer underruns only uses PIO4 (16 MB/sec)!!! It is written in all letters in their spec. I just got a shock when I saw this on their web site. If you think of it, the CD drives don't need DMA or UDMA: Even the 70x or so speed still is under 33 MB/sec. But I strongly feel it a bit selfish to only use PIO4, because of the potential slowing down of the other drive on the same cable.
DVD-ROM drives are a completely different matter, because DVD Video needs at least the speed of DMA33 to work properly.
Cheers,
Michka


[This message has been edited by Michel Carleer (edited 22 September 2000).]

[wkulecz]

Michel,

I know there are still CD-R drives that use PIO mode4. I agree its not that big a deal. If they support ATAPI correctly they can be slave to a UDMA Master without problems (UDMA66 might be an issue, I've not tried this mix yet). Some burner software asks that you turnoff DMA on the CD-R drive -- I guess it must have fixed a problem somewhere at least once :-)

The last four CD-RW and last six CDROMs I've installed have all worked UDMA -- only the Yamaha 8824 was anywhere close to top of the line.

My point is unless you are stuck with a "buggy" IDE chipset, you are generally better off with the capture drive and system drive on seperate IDE channels and the other ATAPI devices shouldn't cause problems as slaves. Although I'm sure there is crap out there that will, but if it does its not doing ATAPI correctly.

Of course if you have problems, it pays to permute the combinitions before giving up and spending more money.

--wally.

[Brian Ellis]

FWIW, my set up is

1. IDE0 Master: Boot partition and apps partition
2. IDE0 Slave: CD-ROM
3. IDE1 Master: Swapfile partition and Video partition
4. IDE1 Slave: Blank
5. SCSI: CD-writer

This works fine. Swapping around 2 and 3 or putting the swapfile partition on the IDE0 Master reduced performance significantly.

------------------
Brian (the terrible)

[wkulecz]

Brian,

I'm curious as to what brand CDROM you have that makes a noticible performance difference depending on if its primary or secondary slave.

I've swapped around a really lame BTC 24X in my Marvel system and it made no noticible differnece in performance (not that I was looking for it with "benchmarks", MSPro5.2 is my only benchmark on this system :-)

I've never done anyting but leave the swapfile where W98 puts it on install (drive C , but then I've never tried to run w98 with less than 128MB of RAM.

I agree its starting to make sense to get a cheap SCSI controller and SCSI versions of CR-RW, CDROM, and DVD and load up the four IDE (2 IRQs) with large, cheap, IDE drives. Problem is you're looking at adding almost $50 each to the cost of your CD-RW, DVD, & CDROM and you have few choices of make and model. A good cheap generic busmastering SCSI controller based on the Symbios 53C8xx chip can be found for ~$35. Its probably worth it to spend this up front if you are setting up a system for video editing even if you start with only two drives. IDE $/GB is still going down, SCSI device premiems are hold steady or going up a bit, and selection is getting smaller.

--wally.

[Michel Carleer]

Wally,
OK, I did not want to say that having two HD on one cable and a DVD and a CD burner on the second was the best of solutions. Yours is certainly better. Going one drive per controller, or going SCSI is most sensible. I just wanted to say that if you are stuck with four drives, and only two IDE connectors, you better put the two HD together. Provided of course that they are both UDMA ones, and not one UDMA and one PIO (but then, who still uses such oldies?)
Michka

[This message has been edited by Michel Carleer (edited 22 September 2000).]

[Dr Mordrid]

T_I was right. This one is always the genesis of a long thread

To be honest about it I've used most of these methods. Right now the RT-2000 system has the DVD and CDR/RW as master/slave on the secondary IDE.

The "video drive" is a pair of big RAID arrays (big suprise if you know me at all )

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 23 September 2000).]

[Grigory]

Let us clarify things.

Old drives and some CD devices might not support Ultra DMA mode. This, however, does not mean they are not capable to work with ordinary DMA. The misunderstanding is that 16.6 and lower transfer speeds are named as PIO modes only in system bios. The newer Ultra 33, 66, and 100 modes are named as DMA. However, all these drives/controllers still work in PIO mode in DOS.
Actually, any drive is working under some protocol with drive controller, these protocols may support 16.6, 33, 66 or 100 Mbytes/sec speeds, but the controller itself may work via CPU (Programmed Input-Output mode, PIO) or directly with PCI bus, using DMA mode.
The ability of drive to communicate with controller has mixed names as PIO, UltraDMA 33,66,100. But the ability of controller to communicate with system via CPU or directly is named also as PIO or DMA.
Starting from TX, all Intel motherboard controllers could work in DMA mode:
For PIO3 device, it should be possible to work in DMA mode with maximum transfer speed of 12 MB/sec, but with low CPU load.
For PIO4 device, it is possible to make it working in DMA 16.6 mode
For Ultra 33,66,100 it is possible to make them working in DMA mode with those speeds.

But, it is also possible to set any of these devices to work in PIO mode. Although the maximum interface speed between the drive and controller remains unchanged, the 100% CPU load in PIO mode typically limits the datarate at about 10 MB/sec regardless of the drive.
All motherboards I used for the last 5 years were able to mix almost all modes on all four devices in any combinations:

Two weeks ago I was usinf Abit BP6 with video drives as primary slave and secondary slave. Secondary master was DVD rom drive, detected as PIO4 and working in DMA 16.6 mode.
I also used video drives connected to any channel of integrated HPT366 controller, and combined with CD rom.
I was also able to make software RAID from Secondary Slave on Intel controller and Primary Master on hpt in Win2000. Each drive had 12MB/sec transfer rate, the raid was able to write uncompressed YUY2 720x576x25fps video at 22 MB/sec with 10% CPU utilization and no dropped frames. One drive was working in DMA33, anothe in DMA66 mode. No problems.

You can enable or disable UltraDMA mode in CMOS setup, but this only affects the maximum speed of connection between the drive and controller. This does NOT change the ability to use DMA mode in windows. I even not sure that disabling ULTRA mode is not completely ignored by windows drivers.


Asus CUBX. This is another story. Fujitsu MPD drive (DMA66) was able to read at full speed on built-in cmd controller, but could write only at ... 4 MB/sec. Excellent design! Changed the cable to ordinary and got normal operation.
Secondary channel of Intel controller switched to PIO mode only in win2000 and 98 when I used DVD rom and old 2x2x6 CD RW on it. Both support DMA if connected to another channels.
The same CD RW is working now as secondary master together with DMA33 hard drive. Windows uses PIO mode for CDRW and full speed DMA33 mode for hard drive. No problem with video.
Conclusion:
You must check if windows enables DMA checkbox and actually changes the mode to DMA for you configuration. Then you have to check the speed of reading and writing and if everything works, forget about this.
Anything else, like DMA 66/33 is of no importance since the video data rate does not exceed 22 MB/sec anyway. Typically, the ability to read and write data is limited by the internal drive's transfer rate, but not by its ability to communicate with controller at 66/100 MB/sec

All other problems, such as sudden system disk activity simply do not exist if you limited the file cache in win98 or use 256MB RAM in win2000. I did not detect these problems.

Grigory

[Brian Ellis]

wkulecz

What I found was that, in practice, if you had the boot/apps disk AND the video disk on the same IDE port, I got lost frames. Making them both masters on separate ports did not produce lost frames. Nothing whatsoever to do with the CD-ROM drive (which is a nondescript 48 x drive running with DMA)



------------------
Brian (the terrible)